Let it be known, I guess, that today's silent-film festival programmers aren't without a sense of irony, as the 39th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, a virtual event this year due to the pandemic that has restricted travel the world over, begins with a series of travelogues entitled "Want to Travel" or "The Urge to Travel." This is quite reflexive, too, as the silent-film travelogue was an early exercise in virtual tourism (the "armchair traveler," as Jay Weissberg says, introducing the festival), and, now, we may view this film festival at home rather then travel to Italy. It's democratic, as Jennifer Lynn Peterson points out in an accompanying discussion to the program, this virtuality of travelogues and viewing them by streaming. For a few euros and an internet connection, you, too, may attend the academics-of-old-silent-movies equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival (note: not an actual trademark of Pordenone). Finally, something good to come out of 2020.
The first film in the program is an inspired choice, too, as it adds yet another layer of virtualness: not only are we not seeing a place, as opposed to its photographic representation, and not seeing that representation in the actual place of Pordenone, but the film, "Un Voyage Abracadabrant," too, is not of reality--being an early cartoon. The presenters refer to it as a precursor of "Up" (2009), which it sort of is in the sense that it's animated and features a flying house going places. It also reminds me of a hand-drawn version of the sort of mostly-live-action sci-fi fantasies Georges Méliès and all of his imitators, including Pathé, who produced this one, were making a few years earlier and for years before that. It's very short and somewhat amusing.
(Note: 9.5mm Pathé-Baby print from the Cinémathèque française, Paris.)